Abstract

In this Letter, a probability-based non-local means filter is proposed for speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography (OCT). Originally developed for additive white Gaussian noise, the non-local means filter is not suitable for multiplicative speckle noise suppression. This Letter presents a two-stage non-local means algorithm using the uncorrupted probability of each pixel to effectively reduce speckle noise in OCT. Experiments on real OCT images demonstrate that the proposed filter is competitive with other state-of-the-art speckle removal techniques and able to accurately preserve edges and structural details with small computational cost.

© 2016 Optical Society of America

Guided filtering-based nonlocal means despeckling of optical coherence tomography images

Quan Zhou, Jingmin Guo, Mingyue Ding, and Xuming Zhang
Opt. Lett. 45(19) 5600-5603 (2020)

Effective speckle noise suppression in optical coherence tomography images using nonlocal means denoising filter with double Gaussian anisotropic kernels

Jaehong Aum, Ji-hyun Kim, and Jichai Jeong
Appl. Opt. 54(13) D43-D50 (2015)

Volumetric non-local-means based speckle reduction for optical coherence tomography

Carlos Cuartas-Vélez, René Restrepo, Brett E. Bouma, and Néstor Uribe-Patarroyo
Biomed. Opt. Express 9(7) 3354-3372 (2018)

Speckle reduction in digital holography with non-local means filter based on the Pearson correlation coefficient and Butterworth filter

Kai Chen, Li Chen, JiaQi Xiao, JinYang Li, YiHua Hu, and KunHua Wen
Opt. Lett. 47(2) 397-400 (2022)

Unsupervised despeckling of optical coherence tomography images by combining cross-scale CNN with an intra-patch and inter-patch based transformer

Quan Zhou, Mingwei Wen, Mingyue Ding, and Xuming Zhang
Opt. Express 30(11) 18800-18820 (2022)